Market Street is San Francisco's main thoroughfare. In some ways, it's evolved as a classic example of a non-shareable street, one dominated by motorists, which fractures community and hurts our health. But the redoubtable Streetsfilms has made a lovely seven-minute video (below) about efforts to turn Market Street into a great public place, which I share with you as a kind of case study in building a shareable city, "an affirmative and assertive cultural effort to expand the realm of sharing, cooperation, mutual aid, and solidarity."
Says Streetfilms: "Now, as the Better Market Street Project moves forward with trial traffic diversions, the Art in Storefronts project, music and programming in public spaces, greening along sidewalks, and pedestrian safety improvements, San Francisco's political class is intent on revitalizing the street for the long haul. Though the concrete vision for what Market Street will eventually look like is some ways off, there is more effort now than in many years to improve the public realm and ensure the street lives up to its great potential."
I was actually thinking Market should not permit car traffic at al- pedestrian, biking and perhaps minimal public transit only. Some of these pedestrian mall experiments initiated in the 1960s and 70s did not work so well as some of their European counterparts and ended up being reconverted to normal roadways because they supposedly cut off business. One of which I was witness to in Eugene, OR and tried to stop its reconversion. The problem is that you can't just cut off automobile traffic and expect the masses to come. You need to work very hard to develop attractions in these pedestrian malls and reprogram transit and general cultural patterns. The types of businesses need to be ones where people hang out and there is a diversity of activity. Also, the alternative transit needs to patterned around this new flow and taxi bicycle surreys and "free rental" bike stations wouldn't hurt.